The Reveal: A Detectives Seagate and Miner Mystery (Book 6) by Mike Markel

you’re saying when you
called Virginia Rinaldi a dyke, you were just showing your disapproval of her
teaching methods, is that correct? Is that your position?”
    “I regret that it happened. I regret it.”
    All right, we got that out of the way. “I’m going
to ask you one more time about your relationship with Virginia Rinaldi. And I
want you to think a moment before you respond. Because if this turns into a
murder investigation—and there’s a very good chance it will—and we determine
you haven’t been honest with us, we have to look at you different. Here’s the
question: How did you know about her sexual orientation? It wasn’t public
knowledge.”
    He looked down at his hands in his lap. After a
few seconds, he looked up at me, his eyes shining with tears. “She had been
taunting me for some time. Like I said, her messages and emails were very
abusive. I was going through … going through a very difficult time. My wife was
dying of breast cancer. We were two months from our fiftieth anniversary. I
would visit her every day. In the hospice. She asked me what was bothering me.
I told her it was nothing. I didn’t want her to be worrying about me. You know
what I’m saying. She’s bedridden at this point, in considerable pain. And she
sees me upset about some professor who’s saying nasty things about me. That’s
what I’ll never forgive that professor for. What it did to Arlene.” He paused
and wiped a finger at a tear.
    “So what happened?”
    “My wife passed. Even though I knew it was
coming—had known for a while—I didn’t handle it well. Not well at all. I wasn’t
thinking clear.” He took a deep breath, exhaling slowly. “I got the name of a
prostitute. I paid her some money to go over to the professor’s house. I had
some kid take photographs of the prostitute going into the professor’s house.”
    “Why?”
    He looked at me. “I wanted her to stop harassing
me. I wanted—” He started to weep. “I just wanted her to stop.”
    “What were you gonna do with the photographs?”
    “I told her—”
    “You met with her?”
    “No, on the phone. I was very upset. I told her to
stop contacting me. That I had these photographs and I would show them to the
president of the university—”
    “President Billingham knew about this?”
    Cletis Williams shook his head. “No, he never knewanything. But I assumed she wouldn’tknow that. I wanted her to stop bothering me.”
    “What did she say to you?”
    “She told me she knew I had hired the prostitute.”
    “How did she know?”
    “I don’t know. Maybe the prostitute told her.”
    “What else did Professor Rinaldi tell you?”
    He took a deep breath. “She told me my life was
going to explode in five days.”
    “Those were her words? She said ‘explode’?”
    He nodded.
    “What did she mean by that?”
    “That’s what I asked her. She hung up.”
    “Was that the end of it?”
    “Next day, I get another call from her. My life
was going to explode in four days.”
    “What did you do?”
    “She kept calling. Three days. Two days. One day.
That last day, I said to her, ‘What do you want? What do you want me to do?’”
    “What did she say?”
    “She said she wanted me to resign from the state
board. I was to say it was for personal reasons. And never play any role in
public life in Montana for the rest of my life.”
    “So you stepped down.”
    “That’s right.” He nodded. “I knew it was wrong,
what I had done. I wasn’t thinking clearly.”
    “Did Professor Rinaldi contact you again?”
    “I never heard from her again.”
    “You have any proof Virginia Rinaldi made those
calls?”
    “You can check my phone records, see the calls
coming in. But I have no idea whether she was using a real phone, orwhatever. For all I know, she could’ve been using a
pay phone.”
    “You have nothing from her in writing?”
    “No.”
    “And you said you never met with her.”
    “Just that state board